George V fakes

Fake 1911 rupee George V

The 1911 rupee is also scarce and famous and has good value and its fakes are quite common. The shown 1911 rupee is one of the freshly minted 1911 1 rupee coins.

Fake 8 anna, 1919

Even though we keep coming across fake silver rupees at jewellery shops now and then, we know that they have a fair amount of genuine items for each fake. But the 8 anna coin is so highly forged that you would see 10 fakes for 1 real coin, and in fact I got to see my first real 8 anna coin more than 1 year after I saw the fake one, and I was thinking that the first 8 anna shown here is the real 8 anna. I know that very few of you know this, so understand now that the George V 8 anna was minted in nickel and is grey in colour. The implication is that if you come across a yellow 8 anna coin like the one shown above, then you can tell for certain its a modern forgery. I am not saying that if the colour is grey, you can be assured its genuine, but 60% of your task is done. Even in the grey 8 anna, we have many old forgeries. At that time, we usually had silver coinage and when the nickel coinage was introduced for the first time, people tried to forge their own coins and circulated them since the nickel coins were cheap to forge. These old fakes would also be worn out to some extent and will be hard to identify.

In the second coin shown here, if you have a look the lettering on the obverse is too spread out and that indicates that probably the original coin from which the die was made was worn out in those areas and so the fake made from it was not good enough and turned out like this.

The George V portrait is usually the key to knowing if its a fake as there would be some difference in the face of George V in the real and the fake one. This holds for most of the silver rupees also.

Fake 1939 rupee

The 1939 rupee is the most highly valued rupee of British India so it is easy to see why it is one of the most forged. The one shown above is a horrible fake simply because in 1939 the ruler was George VI and not George V. The obverse had a different portrait. The obverse is also worn out although the coin seems to be freshly minted. This one is rather a poor forgery going by the high standards of some fakes I have seen in George VI 1939 one rupee, and even a novice should be able to tell this one is a fake just by having proper knowledge of the date and the ruler.

Note that in each of the shown coins, the face of George V is different. The face of the ruler is a good indication whether it is a genuine or forged coin.